Now Russell has reflected on the death of the 63-year-old in a column for The Guardian, revealing that he had been “thinking about Robin Williams a bit recently”.

Admiring Williams’ talent, Russell wrote: “Robin Williams was exciting to me because he seemed to be sat upon a geyser of comedy.

“Like he didn’t manufacture it laboriously within but had only to open a valve and it would come bursting through in effervescent jets. He was plugged into the mains of comedy.”

He was an Oscar winner

The Get Him To The Greek star continued: “He spoke candidly about his mental illness and addiction, how he felt often on a precipice of self-destruction, whether through substance misuse or some act of more certain finality.

"I thought that this articulate acknowledgement amounted to a kind of vaccine against the return of such diseased thinking, which has proven to be hopelessly naive.”

In his column, he mused on the Oscar winner’s personality by adding: “A refinement of an energy that could turn as easily to destruction as creativity.”

Prince of Wales meets Robin Williams backstage at the Wimbledon Theatre, London, after a charity performance in aid of the Prince's Trust charity. Actor Williams has been found dead at his home in California, Marin County Sheriff's Office said (Photo: PA)

As a former childhood fan, Brand reveals that he had the opportunity to meet the man who gave us the voice of the Genie in Aladdin, and he wrote: “Now I am incapable of looking back at my fleeting meeting with him with any kind of objectivity, I am bound to apply, with hindsight, some special significance to his fragility, meekness and humility.

"Hidden behind his beard and kindness and compliments was a kind of awkwardness, like he was in the wrong context or element, a fallen bird on a hard floor.

"It seems that Robin Williams could not find a context. Is that what drug use is? An attempt to anaesthetise against a reality that constantly knocks against your nerves, like tinfoil on an old school filling, the pang an urgent message to a dormant, truer you.”

Brand continued: “Robin Williams could have tapped anyone in the western world on the shoulder and told them he felt down and they would have told him not to worry, that he was great, that they loved him. He must have known that. He must have known his wife and kids loved him, that his mates all thought he was great, that millions of strangers the world over held him in their hearts, a hilarious stranger that we could rely on to anarchically interrupt, the all-encompassing sadness of the world.

"Today Robin Williams is part of the sad narrative that we used to turn to him to disrupt.”